The Way of Things Today

Poets & Writers interviews the redoubtable Nat Sobel 

". . . evolving today for agents is that they need to be the first line editors for their authors. . . . We have spent years editing nearly every novel we've ever agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was going on in the publishing houses. But today, agents need to be far more proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in the looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. . . . Those are things you never thought about in agenting when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and that was it—— the publisher took over."

my rejoinder, to every particular: ditto!